Obama's 'in-the-dark' defense

President Barack Obama is briefed each day on a wide range of domestic and international issues, yet when it comes to major controversies, his administration’s response is often the same: the president didn’t know.

The most recent appearance of the tendency came Sunday, as the Wall Street Journal reported that Obama was unaware of the National Security Agency’s surveillance of foreign leaders until earlier this year. The story came on the heels of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s claim that the president didn’t learn of the problems with HealthCare.gov until after the site’s Oct. 1 launch.

Text Size

Obama: No comment on foreign leader NSA surveillance

And earlier this year, Obama himself said he learned about the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of political groups “from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.”

The bottom line explanation in all these instances is the same: President Obama didn’t know any more about the scandal than the ordinary person on the street, and certainly wasn’t involved in decision-making processes — at least, not until long after potential problems arose.

The White House hasn’t confirmed the Journal’s report, and press secretary Jay Carney was reluctant to engage Monday on whether the president has knowingly been left uninformed on key issues. Pressed by a reporter who noted that some Republicans have been critical of Obama for claiming advance ignorance, Carney eventually dismissed the question. “Republican critics say a lot of things,” he said.

Indeed, the Republican National Committee on Monday called Obama the “bystander president.”

“Obama didn’t know,” spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said in an email sent to reporters soon after Carney’s exchange. “Last week, Obama wasn’t told how bad the ObamaCare website glitches were. Today, he didn’t know about the NSA spying on the German chancellor. Will he ever take responsibility for — let alone become aware of — how he’s running his government?”

While it’s an easy partisan hit, there does remain a deeper question about what the president should know and when he should know it.

“There are certainly legitimate reasons why the president wouldn’t know about something. It might not rise to the level of being in the [Presidential Daily Briefing]” or otherwise getting his attention, said Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s former White House press secretary.

Administration officials told the Journal that the NSA has so many surveillance programs in place that it would be impractical to brief the president on all of them, and that they tell him about broader “priorities” rather than individual targets. “These decisions are made at NSA …. The president doesn’t sign off on this stuff,” an official told the paper, before acknowledging that this decision-making process is under review.

In an interview conducted late Monday with Fusion, a new cable channel from ABC News and Univision, Obama said he couldn’t comment on the claims in Journal’s report because the information was classified.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, essentially confirmed the Journal’s report Monday. “It is my understanding that President Obama was not aware Chancellor Merkel’s communications were being collected since 2002. That is a big problem,” she said. A White House spokesperson declined to comment on the claims made in Feinstein’s statement.

While White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler and chief of staff Denis McDonough had knowledge of the IRS scandal before the first press coverage of it, legal experts widely said it would have been inappropriate for Obama to be briefed on the draft inspector general report.

Even if it is excusable for Obama to be out-of-the-loop on certain issues, Fleischer said that with the Obama White House, “‘the president didn’t know’ is starting to wear a little thin because there have been too many in a row.”

“It’s almost as of the staff thinks it’s a good answer, which makes me think the president thinks it’s a good answer,” he added.

Paul Begala, a former political aide to Bill Clinton, said that Obama “seems to know and work hard at flying at the right altitude,” neither micromanaging nor taking a hands-off approach that at times may mean he’s unaware of certain problems.

Still, he said, Obama’s been “terribly ill-served” by the people below him, particularly on HealthCare.gov. “Nobody wants to bring the president bad news. But it’s your job and it’s a sign of loyalty…” said Begala. “I don’t cut staff or Cabinet officials any slack for not bringing him bad news. You have no excuse for not saying I have a real problem on my hands, so you have a real problem on your hands.”